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Closing a circle
in small,
important ways
By Malcolm C. MacPherson
■ Rappahannock News StafT Writer
How often does it happen when a circle closes in a life which was a dream? Even without the treacle, such a journey has the power to captivate, and for no one has it happened with such clarity than with the newly-installed headmistress of Wakefield Country Day School in Flint Hill.
When Kathleen Flaherty Grove was growing up, she visited her maternal grandparents’ farm on Red Oak Mountain, near WoodviUe, at least one week each summer, and for frequent Sunday dinners. Her grandmother, Hilda Crim, had taught in a two-room school house along Scrabble Road; Kathleen had read the county’s textbooks for fun. Her great-aunt Juliette Johnson taught fifth grade at the Sperryville School. “I grew up with a love of Rappahannock County,” she says, and by the steady look in her eyes, you believe her utterly.
She acted on this affection three years ago when her husband, Raymond, retired. He was the principal of the Jefferson Middle School in Arlington. At the time, she was the Assistant Superintendent for Instruction with the Arlington Public Schools’ System and, among many other duties, she advised on curricular leadership to 31 schools, handled a budget of $21 million, kept up with a demanding public speaking schedule, and consulted to the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Overseas Schools, traveling for them to places like Azerbaijan, El Salvador, and Brazil.
At his retirement, Mr. Grove’s students gave him the unusual gift of a Black Angus cow. “He told me that farming was something he would like to try,” Mrs. Grove says. He “apprenticed” for two years on a farm in Catlett in Fauquier County, driving a tractor and herding cows to see if the reality matched the dream, and the decision came about, naturally, for the Groves to buy a farm. Mrs. Grove wanted the homestead to be on Red Oak Mountain.
What attracted Mrs. Grove was the idea of Rappahannock. She recalled her great uncle, Raymond Johnson, of Woodville, telling her long ago that “a foreigner had bought all that property along Route 522.”
See WAKEFIELD, Page A10
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